It looks like the Mantle API developed by AMD is slowly reaching its end of its useful life.

Mantle has apparently served its purpose as a bridge between DirectX 11 and DirectX 12 and AMD is starting to tell new developers to focus their attention on DirectX and GLnext.

Raja Koduri, the Vice President of Visual and Perceptual Computing at AMD said in a blog post:

The Mantle SDK also remains available to partners who register in this co-development and evaluation program. However, if you are a developer interested in Mantle "1.0" functionality, we suggest that you focus your attention on DirectX® 12 or GLnextGLnext.

This doesn’t mean a quick death for Mantle. AMD suggest it will support its partners and that there are still titles to come with support for Mantle. Battlefield Hardline is one of them and it's a big one.

Back in November AMD announced a Mantle update, telling the world that there are four engines and 20+ launched or upcoming titles, and 10 developers publically announced their support for Mantle.

There are close to 100 registered developers in the Mantle beta program. The Frostbite 3 engine (Battlefield Hardline), CryEngine (Crysis series), Nitrous Engine (Star Citizen) and Asura Engine (Sniper elite) currently have support for Mantle. Some top games including Thief and Sid Meir’s Civilization Beyond Earth also support Mantle.

AMD will tell developers a bit more about Mantle at the Game Developers Conference 15 that starts today in San Francisco and will talk more about its definitions of an open platform. The company will also tackle on new capabilities beyond draw calls and it will remain there for the people who are already part of the Mantle program.

However, AMD suggests new partners should look the other way and focus on alternatives. When we spoke with Raja and a few other people from AMD over the last few quarters, we learned that Mantle was never supposed to take on DirectX 12. You should look at Mantle as AMD's wish list, that's what AMD wanted and needed before Microsoft was ready to introduce DirectX 12. Mantle as a low-level rending API and keep in in mind that it came almost two years before DirectX 12.

The Battlefield 4 Mantle patch came in February 2014 roughly a year ago and it showed a significant performance increase on supported hardware. Battlefield Hardline is the next big game to support Mantle and it comes in two weeks. CryEngine also supports Mantle, but we will have to wait and see if the support will ever translate into an actual game with Mantle support.

While the official release date for the Dragon’s Teeth Battlefield 4 expansion pack have only been known as sometime in July, we seem to have come a step closer in figuring out when in July by a Tweet from Origin.

The Tweet from Origin indicated that the new Dragon’s Teeth expansion pack would arrive early on July 15th. The Dragon’s Teeth expansion pack will include new maps of course, plus a riot shield and new assignments.

We are now hearing that new from Origin that it would be coming out on July 15th, isn’t correct, but instead if you buy Battlefield Preminum now, you will be able to play the Dragon’s Teeth Expansion Pack 2 weeks early.

So what this all means, is if July 29th is the official release date, then Battlefield Premium Subscribers will be able to get access on July 15th. We will just have to wait and see how this sorts itself out, but we are now pretty sure that Dragon’s Teeth is coming at some point in July for sure now.

DICE says that they are aware of the “rubber-banding” issues in Battlefield 4 and they are committed to delivering a fix to resolve the issue. On the developers Battlelog DICE wrote, “We wanted to provide a quick update on the issues with Battlefield 4 “rubber-banding” some players on certain platforms experienced during matches with 64-players.”

“Looking into this further, we’re unhappy with our server performance, so we’ll be upgrading the hardware as soon as possible, investing more to deliver a better experience," DICE said. "As soon as we know the exact timetable, we’ll let you know the ETA. Reducing lag for these players is absolutely a TOP priority for us to solve and we expect to have the solution very soon.”

We believe that they will fix it at some point, but after all of this time has it taken too long to get to the point where it gets fixed? Not sure if we can answer that, but we do think DICE will get it fixed, but with no timetable to get it done, it is more of a question of when.

As we all know AMD's Mantle rollout didn't go as smoothly as expected, but we're slowly getting there. AMD already revealed its performance numbers for Battlefield 4 and StarSwarm, but DICE has a set of interesting figures, too.

Writing in the company blog, Frostbite technical director Johan Adersson explained a thing or two about Mantle and provided a step-by-step guide for all those who would like to try it out themselves. More importantly, he shared a few performance numbers and in some scenarios they are very impressive indeed.

Three scenarios, 14 to 58 percent gains

The first test involved an A10-7850K APU, 720p medium settings and the level was Singapore Beach (single player) - which is very CPU intensive. Mantle delivered a 14 percent performance boost, taking the frame rate from 39 to 43fps.

Test case 2 is described as "standard 64-player multiplayer". The test rig is different, FX-8350 processor, HD 7970 graphics, 1080p Ultra settings and the level is Siege of Shanghai. DICE notes that Mantle support for HD 7970 cards is not available yet, but it will be added in future releases. The results were much better, a 25.1 percent boost brought the frame rate from 53 to 67fps.

The last test was a high-end single player scenario with multiple GPUs. The test system was powered by a Core i7-3970X Extreme and it featured two R9 290X cards. The quality settings were 1080p Ultra with 4x MSAA. The results were staggering. The frame rate with Mantle shot up to 116 from 78fps, a 58 percent increase.

What's next for Mantle?

As we pointed out earlier, Mantle will not miraculously speed up every GCN-based gaming rig out there. Its biggest benefit is on the CPU side, not the GPU side. It eliminates a lot of CPU overhead and in doing so it simply allows people to get more bang for their buck. One could argue that it's bad news for Intel, since it will make cheap APUs more competitive, but it also works wonders on Intel-based systems depending on what sort of Radeon they happen to use.

However, the gains without powerful discrete graphics, when the GPU is the bottleneck rather than the CPU, aren't nearly as spectacular as those on high-end GPUs. Mantle will not transform mainstream APUs into gaming rigs, as they are bottleneck by their on-die GPUs.

The results are nonetheless impressive and we can't say we expected more, although we were hoping for bigger gains on low-end systems and APUs. We also need to see a few independent tests with different hardware configurations.

The biggest problem for AMD might have nothing to do with Mantle or hardware - it won't be easy to market Mantle and get the word across. AMD's marketing team basically need to let consumers know that they can invest in a somewhat faster Radeon and save a bit of cash when they choose their CPU. This is not an easy message to deliver. It will also depend on the speed and scope of Mantle adoption among developers, but that's another story altogether.

It appears that Battlefield 4 Mantle patch is not delayed after all, at least according to two latest tweets from AMD's Corporate Vice President Global Channel Sales, Roy Taylor and Johan Andersson, technical director in the Frostbite Engine team at DICE.

Yesterday's news of yet another delay for Battlefield 4 Mantle patch certainly did not sound good but thankfully, both AMD's Roy Taylor and DICE's Johan Andersson are saying that the patch is is still on schedule and that there is no truth to the rumours.

This is definitely a great new as although we heard a lot about the new Mantle API from AMD and seen some impressive performance gains, there is not a single game that supports it. Of course, Battlefield 4 will be the first one, closely followed by the new Thief game.

AMD revealed Mantle to the world at its Hawaii launch event and at the time it promised support for the new API would come to Battlefield 4 sometime in December. In December, AMD said the API would show up in January.

Now though, it appears that the delay may be somewhat longer. Late yesterday Extremetech reported BF4 support would finally land in February. AMD's Robert Hallock denied the patch is coming in February, but he didn't say it is coming in January, either. If it is, it's coming by Thursday. If it is not, that's very bad news for AMD given the scale of its PR onslaught.

Back at CES the company talked up Mantle in an elaborate demonstration, featuring Oxide Games and DICE products. AMD claimed Mantle would deliver a significant performance boost over DirectX, up to 45 percent in certain scenarios. Since Mantle is not available yet, it is impossible to put these very optimistic claims to the test.

Mantle won't be a game changer, but if it is embraced by major developers, it could give AMD a competitive edge both in discrete and integrated graphics. Intel has been making headway in the graphics department and it is closing the gap with AMD APUs with its latest Iris series GPUs.

Mantle could be AMD's trump card, a cheap way of making its APUs more competitive without wasting silicon, but for this to happen Mantle needs to be embraced by developers. It is very promising, but at this point there are quite a few "ifs" associated with Mantle.

In what seems the never ending patch saga for DICE’s Battlefield 4, new patches have been pushed out for the PC and PlayStation 3 versions of the game. As you might guess, these patches again address stability and balance issues. The also seem to swat more bugs which is always a good thing.

As for the other platforms, a PlayStation 3 update is in the pipeline and should be rolling out by the time that you read this. From what we understand we will see updates for both the Xbox One and Xbox 360 later this month if not sooner. Like the other updates on the other platforms, these patches will also address stability, balance issues, and the swatting of more bugs.

A sampling of the latest update on the PC does seem to show significant improvement, but it is too soon to say if this will be the same out come on all of the other platforms. You have to hand it to DICE however, because they seem fully engaged and trying to work as fast as possible to get the problems solved by keeping the updates flowing.

Battlefield 4 players on Xbox One are a victim of the good news/bad news thing with the latest patch news from DICE. DICE has originally announced that they would have a new patch ready to deploy on the Xbox One last week, but as things worked out that patch is being held to combine it with another patch already in development, so the next patch will actually be the two combined patch efforts into one.

The combined patch is apparently already in testing and certification and it will get released as soon as it passes. The latest timetable indicates that the patch should be ready to be deployed late this week or early next if testing does not cause it to slip.

The big news about this latest combined patch for the Xbox One platform is that it will include a fix for the one-hit kill bug as well as the Commander EMP blur effect. Beyond those to big issues being dealt with, the patch will have DICE’s renewed focus on making the game more stable and it will incorporate additional fixes based on feedback as well.

While news is good that DICE has this large patch in the pipeline for the Xbox One version, players can’t be happy that a major patch update was already released for the PlayStation 4 yesterday. It is unknown as to why the latest Xbox One patch lagged behind the release for the PlayStation 4, but all conspiracy theories aside, we happen to think that it was just the way it worked out and nothing more.

DICE has announced that it is halting all new development on Battlefield 4 expansion packs and other “future projects” while it works to resolve the issues it has with Battlefield 4. The news comes as a bit of a surprise, but the studio wants supporters to know that it is their absolute priority one to fix the game.

To that end DICE has pulled developers off of other projects to assist in fixing the issues. The release of the China Rising expansion pack has created new issues in addition to those that already existed. While some might wonder why DICE didn’t just hold the release of the expansion pack, China Rising was already in the final stages of development when the full understanding of the Battlefield 4 issues came to light.

DICE does understand that players are frustrated and the developers feel their pain as well. The release of the China Rising expansion pack has created even more issues and DICE admits that the game is a mess on every platform. Still DICE is committed to fixing the issues and suggests that players watch the Battlefield 4 Control Room forums for the latest up to the minute information on what is going on.

While we can understand that things look bad, it is good that DICE is committed to fixing Battlefield 4 before moving on to other projects. We predict that they will get it right with the entire company working on the issues. The problem is that it is going to take time and players are not likely to be patient while DICE fixes this mess.